An accident at a construction site, resulting in one death, sets one worker off on a struggle for justice that exposes the mechanisms of exploitation and the class relations of a country that had undergone one decade of fast-paced ‘conservative modernisation’ at the hands of the military. As a sort of sequel to the classic The Guns (1964), following the fate of those characters as they move from enforcers of exploitation to exploited, it offers more than a snapshot of the period: the correspondent time lapses in fiction and reality capture the passage of a chunk of Brazilian history between the two films, and, therefore, also the transformations in cinematographic approaches to the social and political between the two moments. Equally daring in content and form, and in the originality of the adequacy of one to the other, it won the Silver Bear at Berlin.
Direction
Dual directors weaponize Brechtian distance as political act.
Writing
Sequel to 1964's The Guns—same characters, crueler world.
Production
Twelve-year gap between films becomes historical document itself.
Director
Nelson Xavier
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The 'conservative modernization' referenced was the Brazilian miracle: 1968-1973 GDP growth masking torture, censorship, and debt.
Nelson Xavier and Ruy Guerra had both been in The Guns (1964); Xavier now co-directs his own character's tragic second act.
BR
